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Comment by cj00 | Hacker News Reader

I used the same concept to build a searchable database of YouTube thumbnails in my watch history. I always end up trying to remember a video I didn't finish from a week or two ago and YouTube's history search plain sucks. So I built an app that tracks all my watch history across all devices, downloads the thumbnails and runs them through a local Gemma model to write a paragraph description and OCR any text in the thumbnail.

Currently at 30,000 thumbnails described, basically 2 years of watch history. Search is via FTS5 in SQLite and works great on an 8 year old MacBook Pro.

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Does a thumbnail have enough information to support your search? I’m curious because i would think you need the full transcript of the video for something like this.

OCR on the thumbnail is sometimes good enough for me since I’ll remember the teaser blurb that they put in the image but leave out of the title. So the LLM description service can handle that and maybe it’ll add in “two people standing in front of a boat” and something will hit in a search.

But I’ve actually started pulling in more than just the thumbnail. With the YouTube API I’m pulling in the description and all the tagging and then I use Haiku to do some categorization and auto tagging based on all of that info.

The problem with fetching transcripts is that YouTube likes to soft ban you if you start getting a lot of them at once. At one point I even triggered it just from manually fetching a dozen about ten seconds apart from each other. So now I just leave the transcripts for informational videos where I don’t want to watch the whole thing.

what kind of storage impact do you have?

Currently at 3.8 GB for the YouTube thumbnails. An additional 800 MB for Crunchyroll thumbnails.

I’d be really curious to know how you process the Crunchyroll content.

I’ve been really unhappy with their website and the way they present things to me that I’ve already tried and rated as one-star, but I don’t remember that I’ve already seen them. Or, I didn’t even need to see them to be certain that I never want to see that image again.

And lately, they’ve had a bug where things you’ve already watched are now popping up in your “Watch Now” list, even though you’ve already watched them.

If I could completely replace their website and the app, and just get their content, I’d be super happy.

Same with HIDIVE.

So most of the hard work was in this repo: https://github.com/ruflas/crunchyexporter-cli. I'm just using it to export my watch history so I can keep track of things I start but forget to finish.

From there, I can serve it up on my own web app that then connects to my Apple TVs via https://pyatv.dev. So from my phone, I can browse my Crunchyroll history, hit play and it starts playing on my Apple TV, all without hitting the Crunchyroll apps or site.

oh nice thats not bad at all

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